The ad-free search engine, Neeva, will be shutting down, according to a blog post written by its founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan. The decision was attributed to the economic situation and the difficulty of convincing users to switch to a better alternative. Despite their pride in creating the first search engine to provide AI answers with source information for a majority of search queries, too few people switched from Google and other search engines to Neeva.
The founders plan to market their developed AI technology to companies instead. They also found it challenging to explain the difference between a search engine and a browser, which made changing the default search engine unnecessarily difficult. Paid subscriptions will be repaid proportionately, and the service will be closed on June 2.
Ramaswamy and Raghunathan were both previously in senior positions in Google’s and YouTube’s advertising departments, respectively. They came up with the idea for Neeva while dissatisfied with the large amount of ads and paid links on Google. They wanted Neeva to be entirely without advertising, with a freemium offer through paid subscriptions. An account was required to use all functions, which was free in the basic version. The German-language version of Neeva was added in October.
